Demi Lovato started experimenting with drink and drugs at age 12 after being ‘bullied'
(Picture: Getty Images for iHeartMedia)Demi Lovato has admitted that she started experimenting with alcohol and hard drugs at the tender age of 12.
The singer, now 30, said she was "bullied and was looking for an escape" when she turned to opiates and booze.
She added: "I started experimenting for the first time when I was 12, or 13.
"I got into a car accident and they prescribed me opiates.
“My mum didn't think she would have to lock up the opiates from her 13-year-old daughter but I was already drinking at that point."
In the candid chat on the Call Her Daddy podcast on Tuesday, Lovato also opened up about how she would regularly steal alcohol from her stepfather when she was a teen, before turning to cocaine, which she "loved too much".
"At 17, it was the first time I tried coke and, like, loved it too much and then kinda bled into me going to treatment right after I turned 18."
After interventions from her family, the former Disney star became sober from the age of 20 to 26, but suffered a near-fatal overdose in 2018.
It led to her becoming legally blind and brain damaged, after having a heart attack and three strokes while in hospital
She is currently sober and recently insisted that she "rarely thinks about substances"
In an interview on Boston radio show, Audacy's Mix 104.1 she said she "had people around [her] that wanted me to be sober. And I don't think that I wanted it.
"I tried just smoking weed, I tried doing this... And I just realised that none of it works for me. What's come into my life is acceptance…
"I'm in such acceptance of my life the way that it is that I really rarely think about substances, which is a beautiful thing and something that I never thought would happen to me."
In December 2021, she announced that she would become "sober sober" after previously taking a "California sober" approach to recovery, in which she drank alcohol and smoked marijuana in moderation.
"I no longer support my 'California sober' ways," she declared on Instagram. "Sober sober is the only way to be."
In March 2021, the star revealed she was just minutes away from death when her assistant found her overdosed in 2018.
She told CBS Sunday Morning that "if no one had found her, she wouldn't be here."
